Virgin exuberance — NevilleHobson.com Virgin Airline's 25th anniversary advert. Reminds me of that classic scene in 'Catch Me If You Can' where Leonardo di Caprio avoids the Feds by bedazzling them with teenage beauties (tags: advertising nevillehobson virgin advert) Video: Watch Virgin Media ad featuring Samuel L Jackson | Media | guardian.co.uk Virgin's 50Mb/s advert, [...]
{ 0 comments }
A brilliant video courtesy of Shel Holtz on what happens when a simple communication project for a client gets additional ‘suggestions’ from others in the client corporation. Superb! null – Watch more free videos As Shel says, watch it and try not to laugh! Such painful memories Technorati Tags: shel holtz, video, clients, brief, communication, [...]
{ 2 comments }
That all of the mainstream media sites now resemble blogs is further evidence that ‘blogging’ has gained a FAR greater audience and associated reach than a mere 133/7.4/1.5 million
{ 0 comments }
Photoshop Tutorials – Polarizing Filter | Photo Effects | Photoshop Tutorials Brilliant tutorial if, like me, you like taking landscapes but don't have a digital slr and cannot slap a polarising filter onto your digital 'point-n-shoot'. (tags: tips digital tutorial images photoshop hints photography slr dslr polarising polarizing) The Complete List of Australian Marketing Interwebs [...]
{ 0 comments }
Now, if I could only win the lottery and pick up one of their faster-than-a-speeding-bullet XPS series notebooks or desktops
{ 22 comments }
I’ve just posted the 200th article to my business communication articles website, on the background to the subtle psychological art of suggestion.
{ 0 comments }
Please, Dell Australia, help me resolve this issue. Please. Otherwise I may never buy another Dell again.
{ 11 comments }
One of the more persistent grammatical superstitions is that you can’t begin a sentence with ‘And’. This is curious; the Bible does: read the opening chapter.
{ 17 comments }
Drew B's take on tech PR: Dell says Twitter made it $1m "Some businesses have discovered that Twitter is an effective way of communicating with consumers. Dell says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive [...]
{ 0 comments }
Subscribe to my business communication newsletter and receive a FREE version of my highly-regarded report, 'Master the Art and Science of Twitter for Business' (that sells for $79)
Statistics for this site are courtesy of StatCounter.com
Last month:
Visitors : 8,788
Daily av. : 283
Statistics for my site with
200+ articles on business communication
Last month:
Visitors : 14,999
Daily av. : 484
I recently picked up a copy of Bob Bly’s excellent ‘Super Productivity for Writers’ e-book and wanted to share with you some of his gems.
Here’s his seven common time wasters that he says writers (and I say everybody) should avoid:
1. Excessive blogging (more than 10 minutes per day) – unless that’s your job, of course!
2. Random web surfing (continuing to surf after you’ve found the information you need)
3. Attending meetings of writers groups, marketing clubs, etc. You can learn and network, but you lose half a day
4. Social or business lunches with other writers, editors, publishers, clients. A waste of time and you can lose nearly half a day
5. Volunteering for committees and similar activities. Every hour you spend on administrative nonsense is an hour you don’t write
6 .Sending or receiving jokes, photos, videos and other junk content via email (or my pet hate – Facebook requests to add time-sucking applications or join groups of no interest to me). Stop wasting other people’s time and yours
7 .Letting a ringing phone interrupt your writing. Get caller ID and call them back when you have finished (or better yet, set the phone’s ringing tone volume to ‘silent’ and get an answer machine to take the call for you)
Even though Bob is focusing his material on writers, of which he is a superb one, the advice found on page 22 of his book applies to all of us methinks.
As he points out on page 21, with an average lifespan of seventy- five years, we have only 27,375 days from the time we are born until the time we die. And since we’re asleep for a third of that time, we have only 18,250 days we’re actually awake and active.
How you spend this finite amount of time is mostly up to you. To maximise your productivity, income and output as a writer, writing must be a priority.
If you prefer to garden, that’s perfectly fine; but don’t complain that your colleague who spends those hours in front of the pc is getting more work done than you are. It’s your choice.
Wise words, indeed. Get a copy of this brilliant book and be careful out there…
I love Bob’s material – as I write I have 26 of his publications, each a worthy addition to my knowledge library.
Bob Bly is the man McGraw-Hill calls 'America's top copywriter.' Bob has written copy for more than 100 companies including Boardroom, Phillips, IBM, Medical Economics, AlliedSignal, and Lucent Technologies. He is the author of more than 60 books and a columnist for DM News and Early to Rise.
Making Social Media Work for Your Business - just published!
Social Media: The New Communication Landscape - for Ark Group
How to get started with podcasting in your organisation - for Melcrum Publishing
Contributing author to:
How to use social media to solve critical internal communication issues
How to communicate with hard-to-reach employees
- for Melcrum Publishing
How to use social media to engage employees - for Melcrum Publishing
These links open in new browser window
Tactical Transparency by Shel Holtz and John Havens.
A belter of a book and a 'must read' addition to any communicator's bedside reading table if they are serious about introducing social media into their communication plans. It includes a fabulous chapter on transparency and business (hint: you want to photocopy it and give it to your CEO!)
Qualitative Communication Research Methods by Thomas Lindlof and Bryan Taylor.
Not just a book for academics, it's chock-full of great ideas on how to effectively and efficiently research your employees, customers, the marketplace and other stakeholders
The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein.
A fabulous book that gives a clear, clean overview of what Twitter is and WHY you should be engaging with it. THEN it goes into depth with so many tips and ideas that they should have sold the book for twice the price!
Practical SEO Copywriting: a ‘must get’ book. My mate Glenn Murray has written a bottler of a new book on search engines and copywriting.
In a cunning twist of bizarre nomenclature, he’s titled it Practical SEO Copywriting. The cheeky little fox! It’s a DIY guide to writing online copy for both human readers AND for that 400kg gorilla we lovingly call ‘Google’.
The danger, Glenn quite rightly …err …writes is that focusing too much attention on all of the supposed SEO ‘tricks of the trade’ will make your copy all but unreadable by the human brain. You know, all that stuff bandied about by the so-called SEO (search engine optimisation) experts: keyword frequency, exact string versus individual words scattered across the page, page length, alt tags, header tags, and so on.
Not that this stuff isn’t important – it all is, and more besides – but Glenn argues persuasively that by far more important is the ability to write copy that people will actually want to read – and link to!
